Delinquent Schoolgirls
directed by Greg Corarito
starring Stephen Stucker, Roberta Pedon, Bob Minor
VCI Entertainment
There are drive-in movies, there are sleazy drive-in movies, and then there’s Delinquent Schoolgirls. We all understand that humor and social mores evolve with time, but even by mid-1970s standards, this film was made to offend and does an admirable job at being utterly outrageous. If you like your sleaze with extra schlock this might be the film for you, and it certainly did its job filling out a double or triple bill on a hot summer night at drive-in theaters across the midwest and southern united states. Fifty years later, watching the film on Blu-ray, I swear you can still catch a whiff of popcorn, car exhaust, and Love’s Baby Soft.
A trio of psychopaths, Carl C. Clooney (Michael Pataki), Richard “Big Dick” Peters (Bob Minor), and Bruce Wilson (Stephen Stucker), escape the asylum and go on a mini-rape rampage. This could be a shocking and violent element, but it is all played for laughs, which in 2025 could be viewed as more subversive than if it was played straight. Eventually the inept but horny crew stumbles across a girl’s boarding school nestled in the Hollywood Hills. Here they find some food and a bevy of beautiful high school girls (who are clearly past their teen years) to victimize in increasingly more absurd ways. According to the radio news reports that attempt to add coherence to the story, the men are extremely dangerous, which is at odds with Clooney’s incessant celebrity impersonations (which play like an ersatz, coked-up Robin Williams impression), Wilson’s outrageously stereotypical gay histrionics, and Peters’ sex-crazed bodybuilder schtick that render them with about as much menace as the Ritz Brothers.
The film is mostly memorable due to the early roles by Michael Pataki and Stephen Stucker. Pataki is a TV and film actor whose face is more recognizable than his name. He is probably best known as the Klingon who started the bar fight in classic Star Trek episode The Trouble with Tribbles. Stephen Stucker, of course, will be forever immortalized as the deranged air traffic controller Johnny Henshaw in Airplane (1980). The girls in the film were all pin-up/men’s magazine models, including Colleen Brennan (aka Sharon Kelly), Kay Lange, and Roberta Pedon.
Produced by sleaze master John Lamb (Mondo Peephole) and released under the title Carnal Madness in an 89-minute cut, this was later retitled Delinquent Schoolgirls and truncated to a 58-minute version that eliminated most of the first act, getting to the “good parts” faster but making even less sense. This VCI release, issued under the Psychotronica Collection imprint, features the complete 89-minute version, taken from the original 35mm camera negatives, on both Blu-ray and DVD.
Whether you call it Delinquent Schoolgirls or Carnal Madness, this is clearly not a film that is going to land for everyone. The uneasy mix of low-brow humor and sexual assault is certainly a remnant of its time. Sadly, sexual assault played for laughs was hardly a novel concept in this film. While there are much better movies of this ilk, Delinquent Schoolgirls still has its charms as a bizarre time capsule of 1970s drive-in cinema and is sure to please subversive cinema fans.
